Businesses realize the importance in measuring corporate health using performance indicators. One critical indicator of corporate well-being can be buried in the business financials. Financial intelligence requires significant domain knowledge, and oftentimes the domain knowledge changes. Accordingly, it is no surprise that businesses tend to expend large amounts of money on software/hardware systems and resources to maintain financial systems. However, these systems can include modeling and reporting tools, for example, that are inaccurate or complicated to view data, contributing to financial processes that are misaligned throughout the corporate enterprise.
Vendors offer integrated solutions wherein modules are provided in an attempt to meet the various customer needs for processing financial information. Conventional financial intelligence applications are received from the vendor where the intelligence is hard coded in source code, thereby making it very difficult to augment and change. In support of such rigid regimes changes require the shipping new product components. Integrated tools attempt to address a general need by many customers by providing a patchwork of software modules and add-ons. In other words, these conventional systems fail to provide the flexibility needed for the customer to design and introduce runtime programs for obtaining the information the particular customer needs.
The use of static templates in financial systems data systems is an attempt to provide some measure of flexibility such as a template for a profit/loss statement in a spreadsheet or a template for a consolidation hierarchy for a financial management system, for example. While appearing to be a viable solution, template modification processes can take a significant amount of time. Moreover, oftentimes, the work desired to be achieved is beyond the scope of the template. Thus, the use of templates ends up failing in practice. Customers are left searching for a solution that offers simplicity while making these relatively complex applications with less work and without needing to understand the intricacies of the system itself.